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I recently started playing around with OpenHAB, which is an excellent home automation application. During my "playing" with the system, I decided to try and run it on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. I figured that it's a fast enough computer to handle the load of the OpenHAB. One thing that I've read somewhere was that someone managed to kill 3 SD cards due to extensive logging (completely configurable). So, I thought... What if I could completely bypass writing my logs to local filesystem and go straight to ElasticSearch (via Logstash)?

If you are familiar with a test framework Cucumber, you need to know that there's a new kid on the block by the name of Zucchini. Zucchini has been developed by brilliant engineers at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Essentially, it is a wrapper around Cucumber JVM with some extra nifty features. The two that come to mind are:

Test Contexts

Mutithreading

In this post, I'll explain what above features are and will walk you through on how to get started using this great framework.

This is a basic guide on how to create new local branches, and merging branches (while squashing all commits into a single commit) to another branch. In my team, we like to use the following model when it comes to git:

Recently I started working with Appium for testing our mobile applications. Since we are developing applications for both Android and iOS, Appium seemed like a logical choice. To make my automation more effective, I have decided to write my own element search mechanism that would allow user to specify element search methods in a predefined order. Here's a small sample of how it works:

I recently decided to get into the world of BitCoins, so I bought some coins. Aside from BitCoins, I also have LiteCoins and FeatherCoins. I wanted to track the prices of all these currencies on a single widget on my screen. While searching on the market, I saw an app that allows me to add various widgets on my screen to track all these currencies, but at a cost of a widget per currency type. I do not want to give up that much real estate on my phone for the data that could be displayed in 1 small widget.

Recently I've stumbled upon this reddit thread, where user AllanJH designed a lockscreen with Widget Locker that has a bunch of sliders with only 1 slider letting you into your phone. I really like that idea and began implementing it. I made one small deviation from the original post though - I am changing the "valid" slider every hour.

Lately I've been hooked on the ELK Stack and I'm trying to monitor all my logs via Kibana web interface. Currently, my apache logs folder looks like this:
and, if you are like me, you don't like to type a lot! So, you would construct your logstash config file something close to this:

This is a quick Logstash configuration share to parse CouchPotato logs for display in Kibana interface. This guide assumes that you already have an ELK stack installed. If you don't, check out my guide on how to get up and running with ELK Stack here

Creating Pattern Variables

Pattern variables are basically regular expressions that have been given a name recognized by grok. To define a pattern all you need to do is create a text file and tell Logstash where to find extra patterns (but that's later).

Recently I started having some problems with my DD-WRT router. I was having some connection problems and occasional reboots. So, to deal with the problem, I wanted to collect some data from the router in the form of logs. Luckily for me, DD-WRT has a syslogd service which is could send logs to a syslog server on another machine over TCP (or UDP?) connection. Since I know close to nothing in that area, I went to the next best trusted source - Google!